by Robert Brady
“I can turn around if you want,” she said.
“You don’t have to.”
She turned, put her hands on the marble table, and arched her back. This was better than cable, he thought. He wanted so bad to touch her right then, as he pulled off his pants and his desire betrayed him.
She turned around, then reached for the robe. It wasn’t silk or rayon, but it was something soft like that.
She looked at him and said, “I would ask if you liked it, but I already know the answer.”
He smiled as he slipped his drawers off. He was fat. He knew it, but he still felt self-conscious about it, especially with her fashion-model looks. She seemed to sense this and she laughed.
“More salads for you, Bill,” she said. “I am going to work that belly off.”
He peeled off his socks. “Really?”
“Yeah.”
He slipped the robe on, and he tapped the alien girl on the shoulder. She turned around and reached for their clothing.
“Man!” Melissa said. “I hope I’m getting that top back. I just got that.”
“I think those drawers are older than you are,” Bill said.
Melissa laughed out loud, startling the alien girl. She pushed the clothing into a cloth bag of some kind, and pointed to the table. She waited for them to climb up onto it, and then she left without a word to them.
“You didn’t answer me,” Bill said, when the woman left.
“Sure did,” Melissa said.
“Did not.”
“About what?”
“When you decided.”
“Oh, that.”
She didn’t continue and he sighed.
“Why are you fighting me off so hard,” she said finally. “I thought you would like me.”
“I think you’re a great gal,” Bill said. “But you’re younger than my daughter.”
It was out of his mouth before he remembered about her parents, probably a sore spot for her.
“You know what I need right now?” Melissa asked him.
His heart skipped a beat. She saw his expression and smacked him.
“A cigarette, you dog.”
“Oh, don’t remind me,” Bill said. “I’ve been dying. And you know they aren’t going to have them here.”
“What?”
“Dorothy, we aren’t in Kansas anymore,” Bill said. “I thought they were space aliens, but this is a whole other world, if these people are to be believed.”
“Do you think they can be believed?”
Bill shrugged. “That tunnel between there and here would be quite a trick,” he said. “And their language isn’t like how people speak. It sounds more like whistling.”
“It was like a flute playing,” Melissa said.
“I can’t think of any language that is like that, and I used to work in communications, so I’ve heard a lot. Languages obey certain rules based on the noises people can make. And those didn’t look like people.”
“You could see better aliens on Star Trek,” Melissa said.
“Yeah, but you can always see the makeup lines up close,” he said. “Those weren’t masks, those people look that way. Those eyes are definitely real.”
“So, some kind of worm hole, star gate, watcha-ma-call-it,” Melissa said.
“I think so.”
“And we have to wait for them to let us go,” she said. “Except they don’t seem to know how we got here.”
“Yeah,” Bill said. “I don’t like that much.”
She looked down at her feet kicking, then back at him.
“Take care of me, okay?” he saw tears in her eyes.
“Of course I will,” he said.
“No, I mean it,” Melissa took his hand and held it in her lap. “Be there for me, do the Lancelot thing, guardian protector, whatever the hell. Will you?”
He squeezed her hand. “I will Melissa,” he promised. “I am right here for you.”
She worried about having bolted, he knew. She either blamed herself or him, and either way she expected him to handle it.
In his heart, he knew he would—somehow.
Their hosts made a liar out of him almost immediately. An older Uman-Chi came into the room, and the first thing he wanted to do was separate them.
Melissa took a death grip on Bill’s upper arm. The older man tried to guide her away by her elbow. That failing, he took a firm grip of her shoulder and pulled.
Bill straightened and pulled back on Melissa. The Uman-Chi gave a prolonged whistle and four men came in wearing metal armor and carrying long knives, not quite Bowie knives and not quite swords.
They wore an armor of rings connected to other rings, like what had seen in movies about knights and such. The long knives sat ready in their hands.
They looked like Uman-Chi but Bill could see the differences. They were darker. They didn’t have the silver eyes, and they clearly deferred to this older man. Their eyebrows grew pencil thin and sat raised in arches high above their eyes. Their ears seemed more human and less pointed, and yet had no lobes.
They indicated the girl, and Bill stepped in front of them.
Overpowering one would be easy. He probably had a hundred pounds on the largest of them. From there, if he could get a knife, he had a chance.
With no warning his feet affixed themselves to the floor and his arms to his side. He tried to pull against his own limbs, to work his muscles and defend her, but Bill remained as still as a statue. He did nothing but watch as two of them took Melissa, one by either arm, out the door and away from him. To her credit she kicked and screamed and looked to him to intervene, but he couldn’t even wave good-bye.
The moment she left the room, he could move. At first he thought to charge after her, but the old man, the Uman-Chi, raised a threatening hand.
The old man could do something to immobilize him. He wouldn’t hesitate to use it, and he’d been wise enough to leave two of these other beings behind with their swords out. Bill would have had his hands on the man’s neck otherwise.
Bill sat up on the table again. The man looked into his mouth, under his robe, and at the soles of his feet. He took a sample of hair, and he talked to him the whole while, although Bill couldn’t understand it.
Finally the Uman-Chi Angron entered, and the old man bowed to him. Angron waved him off and looked at Bill.
“You resisted our taking your female,” he said.
“Yes, I did,” Bill said. “Where is she?”
His eyebrows rose. Probably a King wasn’t used to being talked to that way. Well, Bill didn’t know a lot of Kings.
“She is well,” Angron said. “We are interested in your health and your nature. And we wanted to talk to you separately.”
“To make sure our stories match,” Bill said.
He nodded. “And so,” he said. “When you have answered me, then you will be reunited.”
Bill nodded and waited.
“You have no nobility where you are from?” Angron asked.
“I wouldn’t say we are animals,” Bill countered.
Angron thought for a moment, then nodded and said, “I meant you have no King.”
“Some do, my people don’t,” Bill said.
“Where are your lands?”
“A planet called ‘Earth,’” Bill said, looking for some emotion in the silver-on-silver eyes. “Does that mean anything to you?”
“Earth is one of the Fallen Gods. Is that what you mean?”
Bill shook his head. “God is different from Earth, at least for my people,” he said. “There are some people who think that God is in the Earth, but not most.”
“Here, we know Earth is a god, and that we live upon and are of Him, and his mate, Water.”
Well, that seemed weird, but he didn’t say anything about it.
“You do not know how you came here?”
“I have no idea,” Bill admitted.
“How old are you?”
“Fifty,” Bill said. He almost lied.
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The King looked shocked. “In truth?”
Bill nodded.
“Do most people look like you?” Angron asked. “Are you common for your people?”
Bill shrugged. “I don’t know what you mean by common. On my world, most people are Chinese. They have black hair, yellow skin and are shorter. In my nation, most people look like me, except not so fat.”
“What do you eat?”
“Meat, beef and chicken and fish,” Bill said. “Do you have those?”
Angron nodded.
“We eat vegetables. Some people eat all vegetables, but they aren’t the norm.”
“Do you know a man named Lupus?”
“Most people have two names,” Bill said. “But I don’t know anyone by that name at all.”
“Rancor Mordetur?”
He was leaning forward slightly. The salesman in Bill told him that this question had been what he really wanted.
“Rancor is a word that means ‘anger,’” Bill said. “Mordetur means ‘death.’ I think in Latin or Greek.”
Angron smiled. “So you know these words.”
“I know Lupus, too, as a word,” Bill said. “It means ‘wolf.’”
Now Angron really started smiling. “So although these are not names, you know these words,” he said.
Bill nodded.
“Do you know ‘ercher nomics’?”
“Ergonomics, or economics?” Bill asked.
“What of chem—stree?” the old Uman-Chi asked. His eyes, though silver-on-silver, seemed more intent by the set of his eyebrows. This was a question he really wanted to know the answer to.
“If you mean ‘chemistry,’ I studied it a long time ago,” he said.
Angron turned and left. The doctor came back and looked at him some more, then left as well.
Sitting alone, he wondered at what he might have just learned.
* * *
They wrestled Melissa down a passage, dimly lit with torches, the walls gray and rough, to another room like the one she had left. They tossed her inside and closed the door.
She found the first breakable she could, a ceramic urn, and whipped it at the wall. It smashed into bits. She followed it with other breakables, glass and ceramic. Finally she had to hop up on the table for fear of cutting up her feet.
She felt humiliated. She had been ripped from her home, she had been ripped from Bill, they had done something to her once that made her weak as a kitten, and they would likely do it again.
Already she felt stupid for trashing the room. She was about to actually get up and start cleaning it when the door open and the old man from the first room entered.
He looked around the room, then at her, and didn’t try to hide the disgust on his face. The silver-on-sliver eyes only made it more obvious. He whistled something and those men who had dragged her in here entered after him. They looked around the room once, one said something that she couldn’t understand, and both left. The older man crunched over to her and pushed her shoulders back onto the table.
She inhaled but controlled herself. Just get through it, she thought. Just let it go.
He touched her. She bit her lip to keep from crying. He looked in her mouth. She made fists of her hands, the nails sinking into her palms. He took some of her hair and peeled off one of her press-on nails. She thought it might be over, that she had survived it, when he looked at the bottoms of her feet, but then he moved to push her robe open. She wore nothing under her robe.
She smacked his hands away and leapt off of the table. He whistled something and he pointed to its surface, but she hugged the front of her robe and shook her head.
No way. No way in hell.
He whistled loudly and the two armored men reentered.
Her eyes widened. She didn’t know what she expected, but she didn’t think it would be armed guards—not for this sort of examination.
The older Uman-Chi shoved her brusquely toward the table and she slapped him. The surprised look might have been gratifying, but she didn’t get to enjoy it long. The three men approached her, all frowning, reaching for her arms.
She kicked at them and they grabbed her ankles, but not before she caught one of the goons in the thigh with her heel. She clawed at them and they grabbed her wrists, their skin collecting under her fingernails. She bit and they bled, and as a last resort she spat at them.
“Get away from me,” she demanded, feeling stupid and scared and angry all at the same time, because she knew they couldn’t understand her and she knew they would do it anyway if they could.
They tossed her onto the table and they flipped her onto her stomach. She screamed her lungs out as the old man did the inspection that he wanted to do. She swore at them, she threatened them, but their hands felt strong as steel on her wrists and ankles. She had never felt as helpless or as violated. The old man ignored her and did what he wanted. When he finished they pushed her back to the table like they might have done to an animal.
She leapt from the table and out the door in a shot, naked as the day she was born, crashing right into Angron as she fled.
“Stop!” he commanded her.
To her own surprise, she obeyed him.
“They will do you no harm,” he told her.
“Little late for that, asshole,” she informed him. “Your old man already got his jollies and his two goons helped him out.”
She stood there, naked, her skin wet, out of breath, half-turned to face him or to run, whichever she needed.
She could still feel that bastard’s fingers.
“If you are offended, then I apologize on behalf of the nation of Trenbon,” Angron said. “You must understand—”
“Where’s Bill?” she interrupted him.
The King didn’t hide his shock at being spoken to so commonly.
“Well?” she demanded.
The old man came out of the room, crunching through the broken glass, her robe in his hand. The two goons followed him.
Angron whistled to him, to the two goons, and then left without another glance at her. The old man threw her the robe.
* * *
Bill waited for half an hour before Melissa returned to him, and then she flew into his arms.
He just held her. When she had cried herself out, she sat up next to him on the table. She didn’t talk to him, just pressed her cheek to his upper arm. She finally managed a weak smile at a few stupid jokes.
Bill wanted to ask her what had happened, but he could guess.
* * *
Outpost IX had already been ancient when the Uman-Chi occupied it, designed by the Cheyak before the Blast. It had rooms for everything imaginable, and the King took one of these to meet with his advisors.
Angron sat in a windowless chamber, at the head of a wooden table, under a glass orb enchanted by him to provide them with light.
To his left sat D’gattis and Avek. To his right, Aniquen and Chaheff, and at the other end of the table, Taffer Roo, who had examined these new-comers.
“They are Men,” Roo said. “Although they are larger than any Men I have ever seen, and longer-lived. The male is fifty. The female is twenty-four. They have white metal implants in their teeth, but they have all of them. The male has hair like a mule, and could probably still pull like one.
“They are aggressive. The male had to be restrained when we took the female. He made her pose for him when she undressed, so we can assume they are mated. The female lacks the hymen human females lose with intercourse.”
“Spare us,” D’gattis said.
“My apologies,” Roo said. “Their bones are heavy. The old one is probably still a match to wrestle any of our Uman guard. The female destroyed a laboratory and required two Uman to hold her while I examined her.”
“I think we all have one question,” Chaheff said. “Are these the Conqueror’s people?”
“I cannot tell that,” Roo said. “I can say they look more like him than Men that we know.”
“They know wo
rds that he knows,” Angron said. All eyes were immediately on him. “I know now that Rancor means ‘Anger’, Mordetur ‘Death’ and Lupus ‘Wolf’.”
“And thus, Wolf Soldiers,” Chaheff said.
“It is too large a coincidence,” Angron said. “They claim to be from Earth, but they think Earth is not a god. In fact, they believe in one God.”
“One?” D’gattis scoffed.
“Barbaric,” Avek said.
“Indeed,” Angron said. “The one they claim has sent them here sounds suspiciously like Steel, the Savior.”
“Could Steel leave Fovea?” Avek asked.
“Steel is born of the god Earth,” Angron said, “and hence does not leave Fovea. Could Steel fetch Men from the lands of the Conqueror? I think so.”
“This could be where War went to fetch His instrument,” Avek said.
“If Lupus is War’s instrument,” Taffer Roo said, “and Lupus is not of Fovea, then War is not bound by the Rule of the Gods.”
“War could speak to him directly,” Angron said. “And War could affect him.”
“And then any god could affect these two,” D’gattis said, “if they have not already.”
They all sat quiet for several minutes in contemplation. Finally, Avek spoke.
“I should like to hear Glynn’s song again,” he said.
“It is too dangerous to sing,” Chaheff said. “We might reopen the whorl.”
“I think that this is exactly what we should do,” Taffer Roo said. “And if possible, send these back.”
“I agree,” Aniquen said. “One Lupus changed our whole way of living. Three could reap even more havoc.”
“Or two could counter the one,” Angron said.
“Or six could conquer the one,” D’gattis said. “And we have either one or two of them now.”
Again, they sat quiet.
“Find a noble young and old,” Avek said. “Our Glynn, young by our standards, old by those of Men and Uman.”
“Clearly,” Angron said. “The others are a mystery to me, however. I have tried to divine them.”
“Can we assume that these two shall lead us to the rest?” D’gattis asked.
“Can we assume that Lupus is the One?” Avek asked.
“I think we must,” Taffer Roo said. “And if that is true, then Fovea is on the brink of a bloody, painful war.”
“A war that it is already too late to win,” Angron said, “quite possibly because of my own decision to wait.”